I hope I’m not alone in being shocked
that a public figure who is taken seriously by many people in our country
(something shocking in and of itself given Palin’s fulsome embrace of the “know-nothing”
attitude that is crippling our country and our communities) could say such a
thing.

The OED provides a workmanlike
definition of ‘terrorism’: “the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and
intimidation in the pursuit of political aims; such practices used by a government
or ruling group in order to maintain its control over a population; such
practices used by a clandestine or expatriate organization as a means of
furthering its aims”.

What Palin was doing when she suggested
that people should be tortured in violation of U.S. and international law, was
advocating for terrorism.For years U.S.
agencies openly met terror with terror, kidnapping, torturing, murdering,
disappearing, and rendering people who it believed to be threats without
following legal procedures to ensure that they had the right person or had a
case which did not violate the law.

To me, these things are terrorism.They are terrorism because they are
unofficial and unauthorised, and usually illegal.They are instances of grotesque violence and
intimidation.And they are used by
clandestine groups like the CIA which too often operate outside of the law with
impunity.

So I am shocked by Palin’s open advocacy
of things that are not only illegal, but also sickening to contemplate and
which have a corrosive effect on the health of our society and our democracy
and the rule of law which we think governs our interactions with our fellow
U.S. and global citizens.

I am sickened by demented advocates of
violence everywhere, whether that is Al Qaeda who killed thousands in their
attack on the U.S. in 2001; the neoconservatives who killed hundreds of
thousands in their illegal war of aggression against Iraq; or small-minded,
nasty people like Palin who casually advocate methods of terror as though they
are somehow in keeping with the values of decent people.

Monday, April 28, 2014

It is to the great shame of the California
Democratic Party that Jerry Brown does not have to campaign for re-election
during the primary season.Our governor
instead coasts to re-election against unviable Republican candidates, and is
therefore never held to account by progressives who face a choice between Brown’s
conservatism and that of a GOP candidate who is even worse.

But although he might not begin
campaigning until the end of the summer, Jerry Brown seems to have found his
theme and his cause for his re-election bid.From the day he entered the gubernatorial race in 2010, his mantra has
been “fiscal responsibility” at whatever cost, and that shows no sign of
changing.

That mantra explains the devastating
cuts he made to all levels of the education sector.It explains his efforts to bend the noble
ideal of an education to the grubby demands of an immoral market.It explains his victimisation of the poor,
the weak, the young, and the elderly when he made harsh cuts to the social
welfare net in the middle of a recession which already had many Californians on
their knees.And it explains his efforts
to shutter public spaces, whether libraries or parks.

It also explains Brown’s willingness to
roll back the regulations that protect communities from the
potentially-terrible impacts of practises like fracking (enforcing regulations
costs money).And it explains his
refusal to back Democrats’ efforts to restore funding to the public sphere
during those fleeting months when they held supermajorities in the Assembly and
Senate.The one thing Brown’s mantra
does not explain is his categorical refusal to shoulder responsibility and
tackle the underlying democratic deficit which makes raising revenue to reinvest
in our society virtually impossible.That can only be explained by laziness or political cowardice.

But Brown’s response to his critics is
emblematic of his consistent refusal to address simmering problems: he passed
the buck by arguing that because there are global factors in play he can’t do
much about it; and he used his signature cynicism to suggest that Californians
might need to accept inequality, breezily saying, “You don’t get the good
without some of the bad”.

To bolster his reputation for “fiscal
responsibility” during election season, Brown will be campaigning for a
rainy-day fund for the state.And in a
sign that he hasn’t learned anything about the process that makes California
ungovernable absent one-party rule (and that’s assuming there’s consensus
within the party that has the ability to override the undemocratic
supermajorities in place), Brown
wants the rainy day fund written into the state’s constitution, elongating
what is already amongst the world’s longest and most unwieldy constitutional
document and which introduces a paralysing degree of inflexibility into our
politics.

The principle behind a rainy-day fund
makes sense.In good times you save for
the bad times.But because California
can’t support its public sphere in good times, let alone bad, the creation of a
rainy day would wind up leading to some out-of-touch priorities.Until we actively invest in the present,
there will not be any good times for the state—or at least for most Californians
who do not benefit from the “recovery” that has bolstered the fortunes of the
wealthy while leaving the poor and middle class behind.Under Brown’s plan, this year California
surpasses the threshold which would require the state to make a contribution to
a rainy-day fund.

But the idea that a polity in our
impoverished state—straining schools, underfunded universities, slashed social
services, weakened welfare, and pulverised public institutions—should be taking
funds desperately needed today and setting them aside for the future instead of
reinvesting for the present is mind-bogglingly irresponsible.One sign of its irresponsibility is the backing
it has received from GOP gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari, whose
economic fundamentalism was responsible for the warped bank bailouts and golden
parachutes at the height of the recession.

If the Governor is serious about combating
economic inequality, instead of de-funding the public sphere and then putting
money aside in the middle of an economic thunderstorm which has yet to abate
for many Californians, he should be harnessing the spectacular—and spectacularly
poorly distributed—wealth of the state to invest in its citizens.

Representatives of two progressive
groups made this point very well in a recent op-ed to the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper in the city representative of the
state’s new, tuned-out elite who are increasingly abandoning the city’s fabled
progressivism for a cold, cynical, self-interested libertarianism (not that
there’s any other kind).

“Instead”, they argue, rightly, that “Gov.
Brown has only created a platform to amplify his out-of-touch, ‘live-within-your-means’
scolding of California’s working poor, seniors, and children.Instead of prioritizing a path to raise
permanent revenue that could restore $20 billion in cuts to K-12 education and
community colleges, $3.7 billion to Medi-Cal, $4.6 billion to Social Security
assistance and $1.6 billion in child care program cuts since 2008, he has
decided to focus on the next rainy day.We’ve got news for the governor: It’s still raining!”

Brown’s emphasis on fiscal probity
rather than the moral responsibility that we have as Californians to each other
in times of hardship as well as of plenty is sad, not only because it
represents his inability to understand the gravity of the challenges our state
faces.But also because, as he cruises
to re-election, unchallenged except by yapping fundamentalists, his misplaced
priorities will continue to punish Californians, diminish our civic sphere, and
reduce our capacity to create a good, fair, and equal society.

The Governor is fond of classical
illusions, but seems unaware that he resembles less some classical sage in the
agora of his “new California” than an addled Nero, fiddling to some orchestra
only he can hear atop a social and economic tinderbox.The story the Governor is writing for
California has all the makings of a tragedy, and Californians should demand
better.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Just some of the interesting or
important stories I ran across this week.

Former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda preparing to make a broadcast in the early 1960s. British National Archives

-----

There was a heartening report
in the Fresno Beethat increasing numbers of Californians
recognise the value of pre-school, and at least at the polls say that they are
willing to fund the level of education which has been shown to be the best
predictor of children’s success in life.The integration of early childhood education into the public school
system is long overdue given the importance of the early years of children’s
lives and the short shrift currently given to the welfare of young children.

I just hope that Californians are
willing to put their money where their mouths are.

The traditional challenge to the ANC had
come from the Democratic Alliance, a liberal party based around Cape Town.The DA was never going to have a breakthrough
with the public when it embraced policies well to the right of the ANC, when
the electorate was clamouring for the redistribution of wealth.And so now the challenge is coming from a
breakaway, populist ANC faction run by the confrontational Julius Malema, who
has embraced, along with economic populism, the language of a new liberation
war, using the language of violence against the state, with sadly racialised
tones, in much the same way that right-wingers in the U.S. do.

-----

This, of course, is reminiscent of
Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who rides around waving the American flag,
and yet declines to respect the law, claims that he does not recognise the U.S.
government.This “patriot” assembled a
militia rabble to back him up as he articulates a worldview which ranges from
treacherous subversion to out-and-out racism.Imagine what the world would be like if everyone who had a problem with
a law—in this case one related to grazing fees—picked up a gun and threatened
violence.

In
a few days, former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda will be turning 90.Kaunda is one of the last of a generation,
and with Robert Mugabe is a reminder of the liberation struggles that took
place in Southern Africa as countries in the region sought to rid themselves of
colonial rule.Kaunda, embracing “Zambian
humanism”, instituted one-party rule until he was forced to allow an election
in the early 1990s in which he was ousted.

Now he is regarded as an elder statesman
in a very different light from Robert Mugabe, and is remembered fondly across
Southern Africa because under his watch, Zambia offered support and sanctuary
to liberation groups from across the region.His support for these anti-colonial movements came at some economic cost
as the apartheid government in South
Africa sought to cripple its neighbours.

The case regards the failure of states
with weapons of nuclear terror to live up to their treaty obligations, pointing
out that “the weapons states are currently in the process of modernising their
nuclear weapons, which it portrays as a clear violation of the [Non
Proliferation Treaty]”.Of course, Israel,
North Korea, India and Pakistan have not even signed the treaty, adding a layer
of complexity to address the potential of these weapons to unleash terror on
the world.

This is a particularly poignant story
for me, because my first college research paper was written for Professor James
Egan’s Peoples of the Pacific anthropology class at UC Irvine on nuclear
testing on the Pacific.Research for
that paper involved reading the accounts of many people from islands across the
Pacific Ocean whose lives were upended by the games of the nuclear powers.

The agency charged with ensuring the
safety and health of the public in the face of threats to our air and water
supplies is better able to map the location of the worst pollution, which
perhaps unsurprisingly corresponds with the presence of some of the poorest and
most vulnerable members of our state community, those lacking the means to
stick up for themselves.

The psychopathic hypocrites who are
trying to buy elections, re-write science with their hired guns, crush the
ability of workers to organise themselves, are now trying to roll back
regulations and subsidies which ask states to diversify the source of their
power and provide incentives to households and consumers to do so.It is a sad statement of how our democracy
and our energy policy can be driven by the money of a few vested interests,
rather than any sense of the public good.

While a populist party based around
Delhi is likely to be one beneficiary, the consensus seems to be that big
winner will be the Hindu nationalist BJP, which manages to combine rank
populism with corporate pandering while being led by a man accused of fostering
or else permitting communal violence under his watch in his home state.

Allowing for the massive numbers, huge
spaces, and trying logistics, the election takes place over a lengthy period of
time, during which the polls are under the watch of the generally well-regarded
Election Commission.While in some
countries a disputed election is decided by nine political appointees, other
countries like India have credible, independent institutions charged with monitoring
elections.

This was a timely election inasmuch as
it coincided with my students reading of Khushwant Singh’s classic novel about
partition in India, Train to Pakistan.The novel tells the story of a village of
many faiths, the inhabitants of which lived amicably together until the
arbitrary lines drawn by British surveyors at independence, and the obsession
with the emerging nations to homogenise their populations led to a catastrophic
blood-letting.

It is a tragic story, but one which in
many ways was the story of the twentieth century and could, if we do not take
care, continue to define the twenty-first.

The Iranian ambassador argued that “he
acted merely as a translator on a couple of occasions for the hostage-takers,
an account corroborated by some of the activists”.In signing the law, President Obama
recognised the dangerous subjectivity it introduces, and its capacity to
substitute fear mongering for diplomacy.In his signing statement the President suggested that he was responding
to hysteria in Congress and would consider the law on an “advisory” basis.

On the one hand, I agree that those who
have committed crimes should probably not be diplomats.On the other, there are avenues for the
prosecution of international crimes if the U.S. was interested, avenues from which we notoriously shy away in its refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court.“Terrorist activity”, moreover, is a
dangerously subjective category, one which would have barred Nelson Mandela and
the virtually any leader of an anti-colonial movement from taking part in
international forums depending on who was calling the shots.

There is a danger that
politically-motivated claims of this kind, levelled by the United States, could
be used to shut down diplomatic efforts from countries which fall afoul of our
notoriously narrow worldview.Such
action could foreclose potential for negotiation and discussion in a world
where many leaders are prone to resort to violence without exhausting other
alternatives which stand to benefit their publics.

But one thing is very clear from the spirit
of the U.S. ruling, which probably violates international law.Neither the current President nor his
predecessor, nor any of the top officials of the Bush Administration should be
allowed anywhere near the United Nations.Because all of these people have liberally adopted “terrorist activity”
to pursue their foreign policy aims.

President Bush committed crimes against
peace and launched an illegal war of aggression.His administration authorised and practised torture,
rendition, disappearance, and murder.His punitive military attacks on Iraqi cities killed massive numbers of
people, and destroyed the country’s infrastructure and institutions.His unleashing of mercenary forces on Iraqis,
and the cover-ups which protected some of those mercenaries and many officials
and military figures in the United States are surely the actions of a terrorist
government.

President Obama escalated the War of
Terror, and his primary weapon has been the drones, the use of which has
allowed him to substitute murder accompanied by pedagogical collateral damage
for the incarceration and torture preferred by the Bush administration.The President has promoted proponents of
murder—who defend their lawless killing by referring to “disposition matrices”—and
granted impunity to officials from the Bush Administration.

Obama’s drones—the programme was introduced
by Bush but expanded in scope by the current administration—are also designed
to literally strike terror into their victims and the populations over which
they soar, out of sight and out of legal reach.A
U.S. journalist described them as “terrifying”, writing that “from the
ground, it is impossible to determine who or what the are tracking as they
circle overhead.The buzz of a distant
propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death”.

The U.S. investigation into Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq found
that U.S. forces had committed “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuse”.And it was only natural that this abuse,
which in another setting would have been called “enhanced interrogation” by the
Bush Administration, would flourish in the context of a war designed to fight
terror with terror, using the weapons, administrative apparatus, and
ideological premises of all imperial wars.

Critics of U.S. terror are often asked
why they don’t move on and forget about the war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo
Bay, and the broader war of terror waged by the United States.

My own answer is that no one would ask a
society to forget about a serial killer or violent criminal in its midst.The reason that we meet crimes with
punishments is to protect our citizenry and make it clear that there are
consequences for violating the social contract and taking or abusing human
life.If we did not take these actions
to apprehend criminals and protect people, those criminals could act with
impunity and others would see that they too could act unpunished.

If we take action against people who have
killed a few of our fellow citizens so seriously, surely we should be concerned
about the engineers of mass killings in which the victims number in the
hundreds of thousands.If we prosecute the
murderers of individuals in order to protect our community, we should surely
prosecute people who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity.

After all, if the neoconservatives see
that they can wage illegal war and unleash terror with impunity, they will do
it again and again, so long as they are persuaded that it will advance their twisted
cause, so out of step with the needs and values of our country and our
society.This, for me, is the reason why
it is important that people who break the law and take human life on such a
massive scale, or who violate it through the use of torture and rendition,
should be held to account.Until they
are, our politics will remain unfocussed and misguided, and our world will not
be safe.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Understanding the perspectives of other
people is not something the United States and its citizens do terribly
well.We have a tremendously self-important
sense of how we as a people and a culture are shaped by our own history, even
if our sense of what that history is might be a few degrees removed from
reality.

We expect the world to know and to
appreciate this history, as well as our “exceptional” nature, which in U.S.
parlance means “superior” rather than unique.But when it comes to analysing the motives of others, we fall
short.We fall back on jingoistic
formulas—“They hate us for our freedoms!”—or on comforting cultural reductionism.

So it’s perhaps understandable that in
the age of our nearly forgotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq one of the most
popular works of history was Niall Ferguson’s Empire, which offered simplistic and unsubstantiated narratives
about the good that the British Empire supposedly brought to the people they
colonised, and about the example that the British set for the United States,
which Ferguson hoped would take its place as a superpower unafraid of ruling
the world with a mailed fist.

The problems with Ferguson’s rose-tinted
view of Empire, one shared by the neoconservatives, are legion.But two stand out.One is the shocking violence that accompanied
not only colonial conquests, but the subsequent “pacificiation” campaigns to
put down resistance, and the raw brutality with which the British and other
imperial powers met nationalists in later decades.

The second is that in his crude balance
table of what the British “gave” to the people whose societies they conquered,
economies they plundered, and cultures they subdued, there are no voices to be
heard from the tens of millions of people who the British ruled.

Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: the Revolt Against the West and the Remaking
of Asia (New York: Picador, 2012) is a wonderful antidote to Ferguson’s
ahistorical propaganda, with its silent million and refusal to contemplate the
British Empire’s record.

Mishra looks at what was common in the
experience of Empire amongst Asian states which had highly-developed senses of
their own historical roles, cultural prestige, and place in the world.Mishra tells this story through key
characters, scholars and revolutionaries whose likely-unfamiliar names mask
sympathetic stories and a series of encounters across Asia whereby those
experiencing the short end of the imperial stick debated how to respond to
European and American terrorism and occasionally sought to present a united
front, something never realised thanks to different historical trajectories and
different state models.

There is the Ottomans’ ecumenical
empire, with its sophisticated administrative structures designed to absorb and
accommodate an incredible range of ethnicities, languages, and traditions,
something no other European power sought to emulate.

And then there was the Japanese state,
which in a debate that echoes in parts of Asia and Africa today, decided that to
counter the west it needed not only rapid development driven by an
authoritarian state shorn of representative niceties, but also an empire of its
own.

There was also the erstwhile superpower,
China, which in a conceit that might sound familiar to Americans today, thought
itself the centre of the world, a “Middle Kingdom” contemptuous of the notion
that it could learn anything from the world’s other peoples.The insularity was not just technological and
cultural.It was historical, inasmuch as
the Chinese government, like its American counterpart today, proved incapable
of understanding the motives and reacting to the blandishments of the depraved
thugs who came pushing opium at the point of a gun.

When China rejected the advances of
British merchants, the British Empire brought its navy and troops from India to
bear, unleashing terror on cities near the sea and rivers, burning the Summer
Palace, and humiliating the country’s leadership, imposing a financially crippling
indemnity and a series of devastating legal and commercial requirements which
undermined the ability of the state to defend the interests of its people.

Mishra’s characters are cosmopolitans.In their quest to revive their respective civilisations
they travelled.Their journeys took them
around an Islamic world which rivalled the “West” as an idea in search of a
fixed geography.Their travels took them
to Japan, seat of an expanding Asian Empire which defeated the Russian navy in
1905 and offered hope to people across the Asian landmass.And they found themselves in the lands of
their oppressors, from which they drew lessons about the sources of the West’s
power as well as the extent of the violence and depravity associated with the
construction of wildly unstable and unequal societies.

Mishra’s narrative allows us to
understand the moral and intellectual feebleness of modern-day imperialists’
conception of Empire, but it also allows us to see the perspective of
revolutionaries, thinkers, writers, freedom-fighters, and would-be
nation-builders who were the victims of Western expansion, enrichment, and
duplicity.If we would like to
understand why people look askance at us and question our motives today, it
would be helpful to understand how not long ago we gave them very good reason
to do so.

Mishra’s writing is beautiful, his
characters tragic, and his story one which badly needs to be heard today thanks
not only for its contribution to an historical record and his resuscitation of
some extraordinary figures, but for what it offers to an impoverished discourse
today in which the West lacks the language and understanding to engage with rising
powers and societies which will increasingly not settle for contemptuous
dismissal.Just as Commodore Perry’s
gunships disrupted Japan’s sense of place 160 years ago, there are economic and
political developments afoot today which demand that analysis be accompanied by
empathy and understanding, part of which should be of an historical
character.Mishra makes a fine
contribution in his demand that the experiences of Asia and the perspective of
Asians during the era of colonialism and internationalism be taken seriously.

Friday, April 18, 2014

I just thought I’d share a round-up of
some of the stories that have caught my attention in the last week.

-----

A map of the new Lake Kariba from the British National Archives

For reporting on the tremendous
overreach of the national security state, the
Guardian and the Washington Post received the Pulitzer prize, the most prestigious
journalism award in the United States and beyond.Without the reporting of these papers and, it
should be said, the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden, we would never have known
of the extraordinary overreach of the NSA and other arms of the security
state.We would never have known that
members of the rogue intelligence agencies have lied in Congress and broken the
law.

There are some Republicans and
right-wing Democrats in Congress who think that Snowden and anyone who reports
on him are traitors.If they are
defending serial lawbreakers who have violated the public trust, they need to
take a long, hard look in the mirror, particularly given revelations that
wittingly or otherwise, the NSA’s preoccupations with spying on citizens to
perpetuate U.S. terror abroad prevented
them from stopping the Heartbleed bug, something which is a real threat to the
public.

-----

One of the most dramatic, harrowing, and
touching stories I’ve run across in my research—well-documented by other
historians—was the construction in the late-1950s of the Kariba Dam on the
Zambezi River, at the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe.Then the largest man-made lake in the world,
Kariba required the displacement of tens of thousands of people, whose
departure from the Valley which was to be flooded was tragic and
unwilling.

Concerns for the protection of species,
the regulation of pollutants, the preservation of “natural wonders”, and the
relationship between “natural” and “human” ecosystems and habitats were pushed
by grassroots movements which harnessed new sciences.Our world would be a very different place
without the environmental movement, although our growth-oriented economy and
inability to come to grips with the threat posed by climate change suggest that
we have a long way to go.

Countries in Southern Africa generally
have more liberal hunting laws than their East African counterparts, where the
illegal ivory trade is brisker and enforcement more difficult.But global efforts to crack down on the
hunting of animals like elephants have likely had an impact on the Botswana government’s
policy, demonstrating the power of international conservation groups, which
often pay little attention to events on the ground, or the human presence in many
of the lands they regard as “wilderness”.

It was one hundred years ago this summer
that the First World War exploded in Europe, driven by secretive alliance
systems, the power of arms industries, mindless patriotism, and a diplomacy
based on brinkmanship.That senseless
war cost the lives of millions.

Corker is a mulish defender of the
illegal war of aggression in Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people,
so he appears to be someone who doesn’t understand or care about the consequences
of his actions when they claim the lives of other people.Hopefully his colleagues and the
administration have better sense.

Political power in the United States is
increasingly associated with great wealth, meaning that the middle and working
classes, defended by people like Elizabeth Warren, are being written out of the
political process.

-----

One smaller result of the monetisation
of politics is the ever greater importance of hired guns.Campaigns are increasingly about fundraising
and targeting, and so “political experts” play a tremendous role in these
campaigns, combining efforts to control the process with an utter lack of
principles.

That in turn reminded me of the fact
that Jim Messina, another Obama campaign officer, had last year joined the
Conservative Party offering his services, and throwing
any progressive principles he ever pretended to have out the window.The fact that political campaigns are in the
hands of these opportunistic thugs might explain why even in an ostensibly
progressive party like the Democratic Party, there are so few conversations
about the economic and social welfare of the public.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.